In this post-Download Festival era, Reading & Leeds Festivals are lucky to still be able to book bands like Killswitch Engage. Hugh Platt shared a beer with their drummer, Justin Foley, once they finished tearing up the main stage.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was originally published on MusicTowers.com. It is re-printed here with their full permission.

Killswitch Engage are something of an enigma – despite more than half the band different from the original line-up, their popularity swells with each new release. They’ve survived more internal upheaval than the crowd’s collective colon after a night of festival cuisine. Yet they’re here on the first day of the Leeds end of the Carling Weekend, months before they’ve got an album to promote, playing to hordes of screaming metal kids.

So, how was it out there today?
It was awesome; it was huge. It was really…really big. I thought it went really well. We did Download last year, that was pretty big. This one was about the same size. I don’t really think about it, but that’s how it looked.

Download’s obviously got a more ‘metal’ audience – do you think it was tougher playing to a more mainstream crowd today?
Download is definitely more metal, but I wouldn’t say today was tougher. You can see the difference…there’s a lot more wandering around goin’ on today…but we played a lot later in the day [at Download].

You did a warm-up show at the Underworld in Camden earlier in the week, which is even smaller than what you normally do in the UK.
It was awesome, so much better than these festivals. The nearest kid to us today was hundreds of feet away, and there they were right onstage, tripping all over the guitars. It was so much better. We’ve all played thousands of shows like that, and only three of four like this, so we’re way more comfortable playing shows that size.

Do you think that’ll always be the case? Will it always be the intimate club shows that you’ll be at your best?
Probably the smaller stuff – it’s in our blood a bit more. If we did a thousand of these festivals, we’d get a certain comfort level with them, but if we didn’t play a club show like that in front of 200 kids for two years then went back and did one, it would still be a million times better than anything we could do on a stage like this.

Anyone else you’re looking forward to this weekend?
I’ve never seen Pearl Jam before. I’m psyched for that. We haven’t played with Mastodon since Ozzfest last summer so it was really awesome to see them again today.

The new record, When Daylight Dies – how’s it different from the last release?
I dunno [laughs], it’s definitely us, I guess. There’s a lot of riffing on it, a lot more of our own mixing. I think we’re more comfortable with it now, as we’ve been together a lot longer. It’s the first time the band’s done a record with thee exact same line-up back again.

Obviously you’ve had a few major line-up changes over the last few years, with neither yourself or Howard [Jones, vocalist] being founder-members.
I think now it shows that we’re more together, a little more focussed really.

At the moment you’re on Roadrunner Records, and there’s been quite a lot of upheaval there over the last couple of years – bands moving on after one record, but you’ve stayed the course. Why do you think that is?
I have no idea. Trapped? [laughs] It does seem that bands float in and out all the time.

Watch the Killswitch Engage play ‘The End Of Heartache’ at Download 2007

Now there are a lot of bands almost aping the kind of sound you’ve been doing for a while. Do you feel that other bands are taking advantage of ground that bands like yourselves might’ve laid out?
Everybody that likes music that they’re hearing is influenced by it, so that definitely comes in. Our band…how can I say it…stole [laughs] from plenty of other bands, but maybe we stole from so many different bands that it came out as something unique, rather than if we’d stolen from just a few. A wider variety of theft.

WeI don’t want to bad mouth any other bands in the metal scene at the moment but…some of them seem to wear their influences on their sleeves.
I listen to so much music, and almost none of it’s metal. I listen to metal just barely – I love metal, growing up playing metal, listening to metal for as long as I could, being hardcore, but we listen to so much more than that, maybe that’s unusual, maybe other bands don’t listen as many other things.

Do you think that means the band are more open to experiment with records instead of sticking to a formula?
We’re not exactly a band that can go completely crazy and do something different – we are a metal band, and there’s only so far you can experiment with that, especially if you’re established. We know what we do, we know what we do well, so we just want to keep doing that and just tighten and focus it up.

Plans for the immediate future?
September, we’ve got a show coming up in Alaska, which is awesome as we’ve never been there. Then we’re playing Loud Festival in Japan, which used to be called Beast Feast, in October. Then it’s off to Australia, with New Zealand and Hawaii on the way home. In November we’re supposed to be doing a US tour right about when the album comes out, but we don’t have dates or plans yet. Back here, early next year, and then another US tour.

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